How in the Tech

Making remote troubleshooting easier with Support Details

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 28, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Troubleshooting

Those of us who have had to support friends or family members with their computing problems from afar can sympathize with one another. It’s generally a painful and frustrating experience. To support them, we rely on them to relay accurately what is going on when they do situation x or click doo-hickey y. At the best of times, this can be accomplished but some can be so novice when it comes to computing all they can detail is the PC is turned on.

Some of the first steps in troubleshooting a remote system is getting a baseline set of information about the computer – maybe even before you begin diagnosing the exactly problem. This set of information probably can’t be supplied by the troubled user so now you’ve resorted to walking them through a few sections of the Control Panel to unearth the information. Additionally, you may direct them to web sites such as whatismyipaddress.com for further information.

Support Details is a free web application that takes functionality from the likes of whatsmyipaddress.com and expands it, greatly. Sending your mother to supportdetails.com will initiate an expedition for a few key bits of PC information, namely:

• Operating System
• Screen resolution and color depth
• Browser version and window size
• Browser functionality such as javascript, flash, or cookies
• IP address

The forensics results can then be emailed to you right from the web site.

Supportdetails.com won’t make you look like a rock-star when you ultimately fix the problem as the information it returns is still quite basic, but it’s a rather simple way to quickly determine a few details that a novice might not know. As always, the more you know about the PC in question, the easier the solution will be to find.